This beautiful volume makes available in nearly impeccable form the work of Pirro Ligorio which is perhaps of greatest interest to ancient historians, his first collection of inscriptions: for those who wish to go back to the sources for the inscriptions they use, his drawings remain essential to consult. But the book is much more than that: in some ten introductory pages, that manage both not to waste a word and to be comprehensive and lucid, a consummate epigrapher gives her view of Ligorio as a scholar and epigrapher, based on direct and immediate mastery of what he actually produced. Of particular importance are the top of p. x, on the work of Ligorio as intended for ‘quegli artisti e mecenati che nell'antichità greca e romana cercavano e trovavano i modelli del loro operare’; and half-way through p. xiii, where O. draws attention to the points at which Ligorio draws attention to the ‘dotte discussioni’ with friends that have often been seen as his sources, rather than the objects or ancient texts or contemporary works themselves, for much of what he says. I would be less certain than O. that, when Ligorio says that something may be read in a particular source, he has actually read it for himself; and her account must now be read along with G. Vagenheim, ‘La falsificazione epigrafica’, in J. Carbonell Manils et al. (edd.), El monumento epigráfico (2011), reconstructing more fully than ever before the functioning of the ‘discussioni’ in question. I do not think, contra p. ix, that on p. 320 (Ligorio) = p. 284 (O.) Ligorio's text, as opposed to his drawings, offers a case of ‘oggetti iscritti non confluiti nei volumi del CIL’; rather Ligorio has rather badly misremembered the discussion in question and garbled a reference to what is now ILLRP 232 (the only full account of the discovery, which included large numbers of coins, is indeed in Martin Smet's MS, rather than in the posthumously published volume based on it).

Susan Russell is mis-spelt in nn. 1 and 15, and her article does not appear in the Bibliography (it was in PBSR [2007]); nn. 89–90 seem to have got lost; and the description of the MSS cited is inconsistent half way through p. xii.